today we're going to be unboxing a new fan speed controller from NZXT this is
the Sentry LXE it's a high performance touchscreen fan controller supports up
to 8 watts per Channel I mean an 8 watt fan is a pretty beefy fan so this is
going to support most of the fans on the market without any difficulty it
displays RPMs for five fans which stands
to reason because it is a five fan control fan speed controller you can
also get five temperature displays you can get a touchscreen monitor which you
can press to control everything anyway all right I think that's pretty much oh
that's interesting it says 10 watts per channel on the back so I wonder which of
those is correct maybe if someone uh someone knows which is correct they can
uh they can tell us interesting so there's a desktop external temperature
meter through a PCI card interface touch interface intuitive RPM control Auto and
manual mode operation hey it displays the date time and day of the week it has
a brushed aluminum frame and a screen onoff switch
it also features an alarm system which it has in common with most fan speed
controllers because the whole point of a fan speed controller besides controlling
the speed of your fans is to alert you if anything goes wrong and it loses
control so the alarm will tell you if fans go below a certain RPM or worse yet
if they stop Al together and in theory that'll alert you alarm you yeah it
should alarm you but in theory that'll let you know that the fan has failed and
you need to do something about it quick fast and in a hurry before your stuff
overheats and dies so here's the user manual which
is really one panel no two
panels okay well there this is the English one right here so it shows you
you connect the little PCI card here you connect the three pin fan connectors to
the board and the fans you want to control and detect you plug a little oh
this is interesting okay well here why don't we why don't we pull this out and have a closer look okay well hold on
let's see what else we have here so here's the touch screen interface usage so they show you uh the places to touch
in order to select fan channels hold this button to turn off the screen oh
you can turn off the screen that's cool because if you're sleeping or whatever
that's pretty handy touch the switch to
uh go between Auto and manual modes modify the time having a manual like
that is really useful cuz I remember I was trying to use one of the touchscreen
fan controllers a while back it wasn't an NZXT one I don't remember which one
it was exactly but it was just a nightmare to try and figure out how to
do anything on it and I mean I'm not exactly
um you know this this isn't my first computer component I I can usually
figure things out fairly easily but this one was just ridiculous I couldn't
figure out how to do anything with it every time I tried to adjust anything I
ended up uh like triggering the alarm or something stupid like that it was uh not
a very good experience but hopefully this one would be
better so you got a couple of different mounting options for this guy I think
maybe you don't I'll open it up and find out oh no you don't oh this is
interesting okay well what I was expecting was for this to be a dual 5
and 1/4 in Bay fan speed controller but
what it actually is and I guess I'd I should have known this somehow yeah you
can see the stand right there on the box I mean it should be pretty obvious but
this actually sits on your desk and it looks quite nice you've got the brushed
aluminum finish that they were talking about before you've got kind of a
chromed accent a the screen itself and then you've got the touch screen right
here and this is I mean this is thick too this is just gorgeous metal because
what you typically see on like a cheap component that's going to sort of sit on
your desk like this is you'd see aluminum maybe half the thickness of
this usually steel never mind aluminum but it would be just like thin thin
stuff wouldn't look very nice but this is actually got like a it's got a
plastic back on it but I don't think that really matters cuz they've just got
a gorgeous piece of aluminum on the front here these uh bottom pieces I'm
not sure if they're stickers or not no it looks like they're just rubber so
they're non-slip rubber on the bottom here to uh make sure that it doesn't
slip okay so if you were to put it down on say for example a park bench you
wouldn't have to worry about it moving around too much see I can put a little
bit of force on it and it won't move too badly all right so let's have a look at
the accessories that are included with the LXE first of all we have this wow
that's a long cable look at this I think it's longer than I am tall which isn't
really saying much but I guess it's got to be be uh wow it's got to be like 6
and 1/2 ft tall
okay interesting I guess we'll find out what that does in a moment and then what
other cables do we have so we have our PCI control card that's pretty
cool all right so here's all of our temperature sensors five temperature
sensors coming out of these uh temp one temp two temp three temp four and temp
five uh headers here and then here we
have what's this this is probably power
I guess let's find out we'll take this twist tie off and this thing actually
looks pretty cool I haven't seen something like this before it's quite
unique fan speed controllers are one of those things that
um it's really hard to find a good one
like I actually spent uh wow after
international shipping I had to buy it from like Germany or something
ridiculous like that but I actually spent about $150 on my fan speed
controller just to get something that worked the way I wanted it to so anyway
here we have the five fans that we can control and then there are all of the
cables for them so you can run these to any part of your case quite easily you
can see these aren't quite as long as that other cable we were looking at but they are pretty long assuming you mount
it somewhere near the top of your PCI slots and then the last one here is yeah
that's power so you've got a um four pin Molex power connector here and then
there's a battery spot and they include a battery for you so I'm guessing you
plug that that battery in and it keeps all of your settings uh stored when the
system is powered off and it does not have any power so that way any of your
fan speed profiles and speeds and your time and all that is going to be stored
without having to worry about it here we have a couple of temperature
sensors and I'm not sure why we have additional ones because there aren't any
more ports but yeah it looks like we have two more temp
sensors how interesting
huh okay I'm not quite certain that I
can figure out why they're here but they're here so you have two more temp
sensors maybe it's just if you want to run them somewhere else in your case
because the other ones are all uh kind of grouped together maybe if you don't
want
to use two of them okay and I figured
out what this Cable's for so this cable goes from the back of the PCI mounted
card here so it's keyed so it only goes in one way so you can see it goes in
that way so it goes from there to wherever you want so it goes out of the
back of your computer assuming your computer is positioned somewhere sort of
around here and then it plugs into the back of the touchscreen
display ah and then you put that wherever you want that's actually really
classy looking look at that anyway I like it thank you for checking out my
video blog on the NZXT Sentry LXE
touchscreen fan controller